Quite a few social science disciplines have become wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Left. Leftist academics don’t just disagree with scholars who don’t hold with their pro-government mindset, they try to keep them out of the club — no publications, no good faculty posts. If asked about this, they might answer honestly and say something like, “Right-wingers aren’t very intelligent, so of course they don’t belong on the faculty and of course their papers don’t merit publication.”

One of the fields where this is true is industrial relations. If you don’t assume that workers must have union representation and lots of purportedly pro-employee laws, the senior academics want nothing to do with you.

Among the few scholars who dissent from that orthodoxy is Professor Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College. He has recently published a paper in Econ Journal Watch entitled The Left Orientation of Industrial Relations.

Langbert finds strong dominance for left-leaning articles even though the journals deny that they have any ideological orientation. Furthermore, the higher up in the academic hierarchy a journal is, the more exclusively leftist it becomes.

So here’s yet another chunk of academia that would benefit from some heterodoxy.